I don’t know about you but for a county which is famous around the world for always raining, particularly during Wimbledon, I’ve always found it curious that we have hosepipe bans over the summer.

So I had to have a wry grin today when I heard on the news that in true British style, and despite getting caught out myself in the rain a few times over the past few weeks, the Environment Agency has declared that as we’ve had the driest spring for 100 years, some parts of the UK are officially suffering from drought.

Of course, as most of us tend not to rely on water from a local well, it may not have an immediate impact on us apart from the likely inconvenience of not being able to wash our cars or water our gardens.

It doesn’t take much to upset the system completely and only a few months ago we saw in Northern Ireland the fragility of the water system when a reservoir was empty because of some burst pipes leaving thousands without tap water for weeks (BBC and Belfast Telegraph). The comments at the end of this BBC report are a stark reminder of just how difficult life is without tap water. A similar problem occurred in Yorkshire, but was fixed a little quicker and so was not widely reported on.

The local government there worked extremely hard to supply water tanks and teamed up with supermarkets to bring in regular deliveries of bottled water, but this still wasn’t quite enough to provide for everyone who needed it. There was also a problem with vandals draining the bowsers by leaving the taps on, compounding the problem.

How would you cope if your water stopped running?

Although the government and other agencies often provide alternative arrangements when problems like this crop up, what concerns me is if, they don’t/can’t or if they do, there is just not enough to go around to everyone who needs it.

So the question is do you really want to rely on others and stand in that queue worrying whether or not you will get anything at the end of it? I for one would rather know that I didn’t have to wait for someone else to look after me and I had enough to keep me going until things had calmed down a bit.

Preparing yourself for this kind of eventuality is quite straight forward and can take a number of forms such as water filters and water storage, but I will cover these in more detail in part two next week.

In the meantime, just have a think about how much water you use every day for drinking, cooking, washing, cleaning and using the toilet. It really can add up to a lot, particularly with children and when this service is suddenly taken away, it can be very difficult to adjust unless you are prepared!